“Meaning…?”
He hands me back the packet. “His blood sugar will tank, and he’ll be tired, sluggish.”
Those words trigger a flag in my mind. Davis Bauer’s low blood sugar was blamed on his mother’s gestational diabetes. But what if that wasn’t the case? “Could it cause death?”
“If it’s not diagnosed early. A lot of these kids are asymptomatic until something acts like a trigger—an infection, or an immunization, or fasting. Then, you get a rapid decline that looks an awful lot like sudden infant death syndrome—basically the baby goes into arrest.”
“Could a baby who arrests still be saved, if he has MCADD?”
“It really depends on the situation. Maybe. Maybe not.”
Maybe,I think, is an excellent word for a jury.
Ivan looks at me. “I’m guessing, if there’s a lawsuit involved, that the patient didn’t make it?”
I shake my head. “He died when he was three days old.”
“What day was the kid born?”
“Thursday. The heel stick was done on a Friday.”
“What time was it sent off to the state lab?” Ivan asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “Does that make a difference?”
“Yeah.” He leans back in his chair, eyeing Violet, who is now trying to ride the dog. “The lab in Connecticut is closed on Saturday and Sunday. If the screening sample was sent out from the hospital after, say, midday on Friday, it didn’t reach the lab till after the weekend.” Ivan looks at me. “Which means if this kid had been born on a Monday instead, he would have had a fighting chance.”
She wanted to get at the hate of them all, to pry at it and work at it until she found a little chink, and then pull out a pebble or a stone or a brick and then a part of the wall, and, once started, the whole edifice might roar down and be done away with.
—RAYBRADBURY,THEILLUSTRATEDMAN
WE ALL DO IT, YOUknow. Distract ourselves from noticing how time’s passing. We throw ourselves into our jobs. We focus on keeping the blight off our tomato plants. We fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro cards and do the grocery shopping so that the weeks look the same on the surface. And then one day, you turn around, and your baby is a man. One day, you look in the mirror, and see gray hair. One day, you realize there is less of your life left than what you’ve already lived. And you think,How did this happen so fast?It was only yesterday when I was having my first legal drink, when I was diapering him, when I was young.
When this realization hits, you start doing the math.How much time do I have left? How much can I fit into that small space?
Some of us let this realization guide us, I guess. We book trips to Tibet, we learn how to sculpt, we skydive. We try to pretend it’s not almost over.
But some of us just fill up our gas tanks and top off our Metro cards and do the grocery shopping, because if you only see the path that’s right ahead of you, you don’t obsess over when the cliff might drop off.
Some of us never learn.
And some of us learn earlier than others.
—
ON THE MORNINGof the trial, I knock softly on Edison’s door. “You almost ready?” I ask, and when he doesn’t answer, I turn the knob and step inside. Edison is buried under a pile of quilts, his arm flung over his eyes. “Edison,” I say more loudly. “Come on! We can’t be late!”
He’s not asleep, I can tell by the depth of his breathing. “I’m not going,” he mutters.
Kennedy had requested that Edison miss school and attend the trial. I didn’t tell her that these days, going to school has been less of a priority for him, as evidenced by the number of times I’ve been called about him skipping class. I’ve pleaded, I’ve argued, but getting him to listen to me has become a Herculean task. My scholar, my serious, sweet boy, is now a rebel—holed up in his room listening to music so loud it makes the walls shake or texting friends I did not know he had; coming home past curfew smelling of hard liquor and weed. I have fought, I have cried, and now, I am not sure what else to do. The whole train of our lives is in the process of derailing; this is only one of the cars skidding off the tracks.
“We talked about this,” I tell him.
“No we didn’t.” He squints at me. “You talkedatme.”
“Kennedy says that someone who’s seen as maternal is harder to picture as a murderer. She says that the picture you present to the jury is sometimes more important than the evidence.”
“Kennedy says. Kennedy says. You talk like she’s Jesus—”
